


At Least It's Not Demons

by Maverocknroll



Series: A Comedy of Assholes (Rhapsody, etc.) [36]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, everyone in Ferelden is named Bran, just qunari being dudes, partly deaf!Adaar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-19 13:55:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14875028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maverocknroll/pseuds/Maverocknroll
Summary: Pre-Inquisition: Adaar's mercenary company is hired to take out a group of bandits.It's always bandits.It's not bandits.





	At Least It's Not Demons

 

A fire burned in the fireplace, and Adaar liked the way it cut shadows into the wall, long and dark in a way that made him seem taller. Adaar was aware of his size, was aware that many people found it intimidating, and usually that was something he downplayed where he could, but not when he was trying to assure a client that his company—and by extension he—was the best for the job.

“Bandits?” he said. “Please. Consider them gone.”

Adaar leaned back against the desk, aiming for casual but likely landing on awkward. Shokrakar and Taarlok usually did this part, the schmoozing, but they were still recovering from the extensive bender they’d gone on with a rival dwarf mercenary troupe last night. Adaar wasn’t sure any of them got the point of ‘rivals’, but _boozing, not schmoozing_ , had been Shokrakar’s last coherent words before she’d passed out in a puddle of her own drool.

“You are certain you will have no trouble?” their client asked, a thin, bearded man who’d introduced himself as a merchant named Bran.

“You see that?” Adaar asked, pointing over his shoulder at the chunk of white jawbone hanging on the wall. “Came from a high dragon. Trust me, bandits are nothing.”

Bran smiled a relieved, yellow-toothed smile. He counted out coins for the Valo-Kas company’s advance, and Adaar shook his hand, careful not to squeeze too hard. The firelight cut shadows into his smile that made him look more sinister than friendly, but Adaar couldn’t tell.

He almost relished telling Shokrakar that they’d be leaving at sunrise tomorrow.

 

It was still dark when Adaar came to rouse their illustrious leader, first with words (didn’t work) then with banging the hilt of his dagger against a pan he’d borrowed from Ashaad (did work).

Adaar used the pan to swat aside the shoe coming for his head.

Sata-Kas scowled from where he sat, putting on the other shoe. “Just because you’re half deaf, _qalaba_ , doesn’t mean you need to make us too.”

“I’m sorry, I have a hard time hearing whining. And you’re already awake anyway.”

Sata-Kas took his shoe back off to throw that one too.

At the signs of stirring from Shokrakar’s bunk, Adaar finally stopped, the pan still humming under his hand. Shokrakar rolled to the edge of the bed, blinking at him like someone who had returned from the dead after seeing too much. “I’m alive,” she said. “How disappointing.”

“You’re not _still_ hungover, are you?”

“Good question. Are we on a boat?”

“No?”

Shokrakar blinked again and carefully shook her head, bone-white hair tangled in her curling horns. “Then yes. Why are you assaulting my ears?”

Adaar shook his head in amazement, tossing her her pants, which lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. “The contract with Merchant Bran?”

“Fuck, are they all named Bran?” She reached out to catch her pants a beat too late, and they flopped across her face instead. She let them slip off into her lap. “I’m beginning to think it’s a title.”

Adaar shrugged. “Considering how many Ashaads we’ve gone through…”

Shokrakar hummed, considering that. “Hey, Ashaad Two!” she called out through the inn’s thin walls. “How would you feel if I started calling you Bran?”

A pause, and then a voice came from the other side of the wall. “My hearing might become more selective than Adaar’s!”

Which, ironically, Adaar couldn’t hear, no matter how he tipped his head. “What?”

Sata-Kas let out a spitting laugh as he bent to pick up his shoes. “ _Qalaba_ ,” he said again, smacking the back of Adaar’s head.

 

After some food, water, and another smack of Adaar’s dagger against the pan, Shokrakar made a convincing impression of someone who had her shit together.

“Let me guess,” she said as they trudged up the path, an imposing team of qunari, armed to the teeth. “You told him about the bone.”

Adaar shrugged. “It makes a statement.”

“About men and their obsession with bones? Because this bone is bigger than all the other bones we’ve come across, right?”

Adaar smirked, but Shokrakar cut him off.

“Right, right. This is where you make a joke about your other ‘bone’ being bigger.”

“And where _you_ make a joke about breaking bones.”

Shokrakar grinned. “Ha! That’s a good one. I crack myself up.”

The path led to a mountain pass, cutting through a swath of forest. In the trees’ dappled shade, Adaar flexed his fingers, aware of his sword’s weight at his back. In the spring sunlight, the walk had been pleasant, but without it, the wind blew just a little too chill. Adaar walked with his good side facing out, his deaf ear facing Shokrakar. Luckily even hungover she spoke loud enough to scare away small woodland creatures.

“A prime spot for an ambush,” he said softly… or what he hoped was softly.

“Yeah,” she agreed, glancing back over her shoulder, counting the horned heads behind her. Her hand rested casually on one of the swords at her hip. “You know what’s bugging me, though?”

“Mm?”

“Merchant caravans are too wide to take this path.”

Shokrakar reacted to the sound of rustling at the same time Adaar reacted to the odd play of shadows behind her, and they drew their weapons, setting off a chain reaction behind them, their kith doing the same. Shadows stepped out from behind the trees, the flecks of sunlight that escaped the leaves revealing them to be elves, each one holding a taut bow, arrow aimed at a Tal Vashoth chest.

“Another move, and we’ll put you down like the cattle you are!” one voice shouted, and Adaar turned his head, having difficulty figuring out where it was coming from. When he noticed Shokrakar staring straight ahead, he did the same.

“Cattle?” Sata-Kas spat, but Shokrakar hissed at him to be silent.

“Dalish,” Adaar whispered to her, and she nodded. Aloud to the elves, he said, “Do you mean to rob us, then?” He knew full well they didn’t, but he meant to set them off-balance.

“We have no interest in the sticks you carry,” the voice called out again, and again Adaar trusted Shokrakar to indicate where it was coming from, “or in your gold.”

“Then what do you have interest in?” Shokrakar asked. At her nod, Adaar slowly lowered his sword, and she did the same. “And will you show your face? I have no interest in talking to trees.”

There was more rustling, and a slight figure stepped forward to stand at the edge of the treeline, bow lowered but in hand. He was small even for an elf but heavily muscled, the busy tattoo on his face obscuring his expression from this distance. “And I have no interest in talking to qunari, yet here we are!”

“Pardon me,” said Adaar, leaning casually on his sword like there weren’t arrows trained on him, “but you are only talking to us because you stopped us. Had you let us through, there would be no problem.”

“Right,” the elf sneered. “Because you came stomping into the woods, armed to your toes, to invite us over for tea?”

“Do you _want_ tea?” Shokrakar drawled.

“ _No, I don’t want tea!_ ”

Adaar patted the air in a wordless request for calm. The elf bristled, but some of the tension eased out of his shoulders. “But what you _do_ want—and correct me if I’m wrong here—is for us, for everyone, to stay away from your camp. Which, to judge from this display, is nearby?”

Like hornets defending a hive. The elf bristled again but didn’t deny it.

“And you are not bandits,” Adaar said more to himself, taking a calming breath and deciding he would write down later all the ways he planned to kill Merchant Bran. If that even was his name.

Shokrakar gave him a sidelong look before addressing the elf again. “What is your name, if I may ask? Or should I just call you Tree?”

“More ‘sapling’ to go by the height,” Sata-Kas mumbled. Shokrakar stomped on his foot.

The elf took a long time to answer. “Alleri.”

“Alleri, I am Shokrakar, and this is my merry band of idiots.” She indicated said idiots with a tip of her horned head. “I don’t suppose you scared off a few humans recently?”

Another lengthy pause. “Perhaps.”

“What was that?” Adaar asked, tilting his head. “I have a hard time hearing vagueries. Sounded like ‘yes’?”

Alleri didn’t deny that either.

“Perfect,” Shokrakar said with a blindingly bright smile. She sheathed her swords without a care. “Then I suspect you and I have a mutual friend we should discuss…”

 

On the wagon, Adaar sat next to Bran, who kept darting nervous looks his way, at odds with the smile he couldn’t seem to control. “My thanks again,” the merchant said. “It is a weight off my shoulders knowing the route is clear again.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the rest of the caravan, each wagon flanked by qunari and driven by equally nervous merchants. The qunari had to walk in the trees, the too-wide wagons occasionally catching on vegetation, making it painfully clear that they didn’t usually take this route.

“Well, we do good work,” Adaar assured him with a smile. After informing Bran that the route was, in fact, free of bandits, Adaar insisted on the Valo-Kas Company escorting them through the woods this time, just in case.

When the Dalish stepped out from behind the trees this time, Adaar greeted them with a smile. Alleri tipped his head in greeting, his bow in hand.

“But—!” Bran sputtered, pulling his wagon to a halt. “B-But you said the route was clear!”

“I said there were no _bandits_ ,” Adaar corrected. He paused and looked at Bran with mock shock. “Oh, did you mean the _Dalish_? Why, they’re not bandits! Isn’t that right, Alleri?”

“Banditry is much too time-consuming, Adaar,” Alleri replied. He stepped close enough for Adaar to better make out the shape of his face under the markings, a square jaw under high cheekbones. He looked Bran up coldly, making the human shrivel, and for all his lack of height, Adaar would not want to mess with this elf.

“Sending a team of Tal Vashoth into Dalish territory,” said Shokrakar, coming around to sling a heavy arm across Alleri’s shoulders. “It’s almost like he wanted us to fight!”

“That would have been terrible,” Adaar agreed, playing along. “One or both sides, wiping out the other.”

Surrounded by the three of them, Bran whimpered. “I-I just… I just thought you’d be able to scare them off, so we could keep doing our hunting out here! If… if humans tried, I was afraid we’d start something!”

“I think you kind of did start something, Bran, my friend,” Adaar said amiably, patting him on the back hard enough to make him lurch forward in his seat. “Now how about you say we end it?”

Bran trembled hard enough to shake the wagon. “Please don’t kill me.”

 

The merchants traded some of their merchandise for their lives, merchandise that turned out to be mostly tea, ironically, some of it that dwarven piss-water with a clean-shaven dwarf on the tin, but some of it the good stuff from Antiva. The merchants left the way they’d come, without their escorts and with their tails tucked between their legs.

“Ah, as entertaining as this was,” Shokrakar said, her arm still draped across Alleri’s shoulders as she watched the last wagon disappear, “you should honestly consider moving your camp. Humans are like gnats. All they have to do is bitch at the wrong person, and you have a Problem. Not to imply that gnats do much bitching, but… you know what? I take that back. That’s probably exactly what they’re doing with all that buzzing.”

Adaar shook his head in amusement. “Sounds like you’re finally sobering up, boss.”

Alleri leaned to the side to squint up at her. “This is you sober?”

Shokrakar barked out a laugh. “And this,” she said, twisting to point accusingly at Adaar, “is why you don’t trust a man named Bran.”

“Duly noted,” Adaar said with mock solemnity. “Shall we head out? Kaariss has started reciting his sonnets, and while it’s too late for us, I would like to spare the elves that horror.”

Shokrakar looked down at Alleri, who looked her up and down and offered her a smile that got lost somewhere amid his vallaslin. “You sure you don’t want to stay for some tea?” he asked.

Shokrakar gave him a similar look. “Got anything stronger?”

Adaar had a feeling he was going to need to borrow Ashaad’s frying pan again.


End file.
